Paul Rose has excellent tone, touch and feel on any source he plays through. Lately he is into his little 5w H&K.

MakeShift
Paul Rose has excellent tone, touch and feel on any source he plays through. Lately he is into his little 5w H&K.

Reminds me of a friend of ours back home, a famed blues player in himself. He once had the opportunity to open for one of his heroes and was curious to find out how he conjured that tone of his. He was blown away to find out that the legendary guitarist used a cheap $250 guitar and a Fender amp model which he himself had always hated. The minute the man plugged in, that tone just came out of the rig...
 
Tone is such a subjective thing. I do believe that the amp sim can sometimes sound better than an actual amp - I'm sure the Plexi model in my POD HD sounds better than my little practice Marshall MG, and that any of the Amplitube Fender model sound better than my Fender practice amp. But I seem to play better through the amps than the models.
 
Now, the question is, would anybody else hear the difference... Of that, I'm far from sure. 

The same debate rages on the subject of real synths versus soft synths....

I am very happy for amp sims - no way I could afford even one of the amps and cabinets modelled, much less the variety of those and mic's and effects etc. that are on offer. Would be nice of course...

The new VHT Special handwired head is $229.00.
 
Way more fun than a new pair of sneakers.
 

Beautifully done! How can I compete at that price!
Tom

My biggest gripe with amp sims (and digital pedals) is with overdrive. There is a spot in most analog amps and pedals where the gain can be turned up to a point where the signal sounds clean when playing softly but distorts when hitting the strings harder. That adds another dimension to the instrument in that notes can be emphasized and they sound cleaner as they fade. Digital devices/sims all seem to have the same sound no matter how hard you hit the strings. Maybe it would just require too much processing power for vsts to emulate this behavior?
Edit: formatting got screwed up.

sharke
The same debate rages on the subject of real synths versus soft synths....

Not quite so much because I think real synths and soft synths are very similar in many ways or much closer. (electrical) Some all digital hardware synths are just dealing with the same 1's and 0's the software synths are. In those cases the main differences lie in whether the sound comes out of the synths built in D to A or your sound card's D to A.
 
But maybe real analog hardware compared to the software equivalents is slightly closer to the mark. And there are plenty of examples where those two things are so close it is irrelevant. Both of them are electrical cases too. The guitar speaker is the electro mechanical device that sets the guitar debate apart a little.
 

There is no argument that I sound like me no matter what I am playing, or plugged in to. That's just the nature of making music. And the same is true for every player... even if you are trying to sound like someone else<G>!
 
My complaints about amp and effects emulation can probably be reduced to three:
 
1) my guitars, and therefore I, react differently to sound coming from a guitar amplifier versus sound coming from studio monitors. How much of this is physical, and how much of it is in my mind really makes no difference, it happens, perception is reality.
 
2) while my current pedal board provides a pretty broad spectrum of sounds, it is still finite, and I spend only so much time dialing in a specific sound. With any of the emulators I use (except maybe Haggis) there are just too many options, and it becomes a bit of a black hole of time.
 
3) while the amplifier models are getting really close (in fact some of them really do cover those idealized models we have in our heads) the pedals are still lagging behind. I've yet to hear models of the original Big Muff Pi or Rat that come close to reacting the way my pedals do, and no one seems interested in modeling the SD-9, which I prefer over the more famous sibling.
 
Now emulations have some pretty big advantages too:
- no ground loops, no bad connections, no broken cables, no wrong power supplies, etc. If the plug-in is working then everything works.
- no set up time, of course if you leave your gear set up this is less of an issue, and even if you don't, the flip side is the time-suck mentioned above<G>
- more variety - I have a Mesa Boogie Studio 22, an Orange Tiny Terror, a Fender Blues Deville, an old Fender Bassman, and a pair of 18 watters I'm building based on the old Fender and Marshall designs, oh, and a Vibratone. That's a fair range of sounds, but it pales in comparison to any emulator.
- more variety part 2 - I won't even try to list all the pedals, but I have enough to create pretty much any sound that enters into my imagination... still pales in comparison to most any emulator.
 
Ultimately it is all about those tools that let me make the music I hear in my head... and for me it is still real amplifiers, real pedals, and real microphones. Now that I've (re)discovered that I can do that in a timely manner, well, I'm happy!

I have a fellow bringing over a flip top Ampeg and his Jazzmaster late this afternoon for overdubs.
 
I can't wait... I may spend the entire day thinking about what microphone I'm gonna use. :-)